The traditional notion in contact centers was that queues were required to achieve efficiencies in work distribution while also minimizing agent idle time. Unfortunately, the utilization of queues almost always results in suboptimal routing. That is an agent is often not assigned to the work item which she is most qualified to handle and vice versa.
For example, in skill-based queues a work item queue is paired with a corresponding resource queue. When work items are received at the Automated Contact Distributor (ACD), the attributes of the work item are analyzed and then the work item is placed in a specific queue based on its attributes. Similarly, when a contact center resource (often an agent) comes on line they are assigned to one or more resource queues that also have a corresponding skillset associated therewith. Since skill queues are provided in work item/resource pairs, the next available agent in a resource queue is assigned the next work item waiting in the work item queue. While there have been some solutions to make this queue and assignment structure more flexible, every solution has always been hampered by the notion of utilizing a number of queues.
In order to improve efficiency, a contact center will typically segment contacts into many different queues. This segmentation may be by service, language, media type, region, and/or customer type. This can quickly result in many thousands of queues. Each of these queues needs to be configured, managed, monitored and reported on. Also, as agents gain new skills and improve their expertise levels, there is a need to constantly reassign agents to queues. Furthermore, when an agent gains new skills there is a significant cost in administration and operational costs of the contact center. Complexity increases because agents are typically in multiple queues simultaneously, and the new skills of an agent need to be updated in all relevant queues. Updating these changes in agent skills is a time-consuming and expensive task, which usually has to be performed with some amount of manual oversight. All of these factors add significant complexity and cost to the running of the center.
Despite this, contact centers still see the need to improve efficiency and to segment work even further. This could be by revenue, age group, gender, accent or a host of other possibilities. However, contact centers are constrained from realizing these additional efficiency gains because of the sheer impracticality of managing tens of thousands of queues. The current method of improving efficiency by segmentation has reached its limits and a new mechanism is required in order to attain improved levels of efficiency.